Director: Michael Snow
Year Released: 1967
Rating: 3.0
Infamously minimal film by experimental filmmaker Snow that consists of a series of long zoom-ins that start in the corner of an apartment and slowly move in on a picture of an ocean on the opposite wall - this extensive zooming is accompanied by a droning soundtrack that gets progressively more abrasive the closer the camera gets to the picture. Though certainly not an art film that will work on all audiences - the easy attacks, that it's 'boring' and 'pointless' neglect to take into consideration that Snow's very intent is to subvert the traditional narrative: you have characters (but they don't have names and don't say anything meaningful) and you have a dramatic event (a man - played by avant-garde great Hollis Frampton - 'dies' in the apartment and is discovered, with muted concern, by a woman), but the characters and their story are rendered irrelevant. In fact, Snow's refusal to play out any kind of 'normal' storyline and focus instead on the technique is the very core of the picture - for the duration, the viewer is made consistently aware that he/she is sitting and watching someone use a camera to make a movie. Its refusal to address any human element - the basis for most moviemaking - is eerie.
